Remnants

 Hello, I'm Jeremy Grant, and this is a little about the Remnants collage and the Remnants animation featuring the composition "No Rest for the Weary" by Matthew Langford. Composer Matthew Langford approached me in 2019 with the idea for a live ensemble performance piece that incorporated visuals from my art as an animated projection. I was interested in it.

Together, we began to conceptualize a project that had dueling themes of anxiety and rest at its core. Our process was immediately very collaborative. My visual ideas influenced his musical ideas and vice versa. Matthew has talked about experiencing synesthesia, and during our process, he would often tell me about the colors and shapes he was seeing, which influenced my final art and the animation. And even though I don't have a musical background, I attempted to reciprocate, humming back musical rifts and communicating what I imagined the visuals might musically express to Matthew as the form of our project emerged in sketchbooks and collage, musical recordings.

We discussed at length a variety of related topics: our human experience of chaos and predictability, the need for space making and the calming quality of the natural world and the fractal forms we find there, as well as the many liminal digital spaces we find ourselves in now. In the end, we wanted to make something that created its own type of space, and our performance ultimately grew to not only include the ensemble performance and the animation, but also custom food and beverage offerings and musical improvisations in in the performance as well.

We premiered the film at a sold out event we hosted, and the video was later invited to screen at the Supernova Digital Animation Festival and the Denver Film Festival in their digital shorts. The film has also seen a spinoff collaboration with Alan Brooks, where Brooks enters into the meditative space created by Langford, and delivers a powerful essay that he crafted on the theme of Afrofuturism.

While the final result of my work on this project was always intended to be an animation, it was important to me to also create something physically that could be experienced in any amount of time forward or backward, and that would reward closer examination. So I created the source material for the animation as a hand cut collage, which I then photographed in stages and layers as it developed.

That work turned out to be the 48 foot long polyptic, which I'm happy to share here in this show for the first time in its own right.